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Revised: OIE Chief's Downplaying of Pandemic Risk Draws Fire

STANTON, CA--(Marketwire - January 15, 2008) - The following information on this Press Release
was copied from the CIDRAP Website issued by CIDRAP News on January 11,
2008. The complete article is available at:

Disease experts and preparedness advocates reacted negatively today to
comments by the head of the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE),
Bernard Vallat, suggesting that the risk of an influenza pandemic posed by
the H5N1 avian flu virus is minimal.

Vallat said, "The risk [of a pandemic] was overestimated." Concern a few
years ago about a possibly imminent pandemic represented "just
nonscientific supposition," he said.

An AFP account focused on Vallat's statements about the stability of the
H5N1 virus. "We have never seen a virus which has been so stable for so
long," Vallat was quoted as saying. "Compared to other viruses, it is
extremely stable, which minimizes the risk of mutation" into a pandemic
strain.

Despite the somewhat conflicting accounts, the other experts asserted that
Vallat was sending the wrong signal.

Infectious disease expert Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, a leading
pandemic preparedness proponent, recommended viewing the reports of
Vallat's comments with caution because of their differences. Nonetheless,
he took strong exception to the idea that the virus is stable and doesn't
represent much of a threat.

"Regardless of what Dr. Vallat said, this virus is hardly stable," said
Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious
Disease Research and Policy, publisher of CIDRAP News. With multiple clades
and subclades of the virus identified, he said, "This virus has
demonstrated an unprecedented ability to change through mutation."

He said the virus is stable only in the sense that it seems to have found a
permanent home in poultry and wild birds. "There is nothing in the
foreseeable future to suggest that this virus is going to die out or
somehow disappear through competition or attrition in the bird reservoir,"
he added.

Osterholm concluded, "Unfortunately, some have read this [Vallat's
comments] to mean that the final chapter has been written on our concern
about pandemic flu. There's nothing that could be further from the truth.
We're closer today to the onset of the next pandemic than we were
yesterday, but not as close as we'll be tomorrow." (CIDRAP News)